Ellen

I remember being very surprised when I first learned about the role of the lesbian activist group Lavender Menace in shaping 1970s feminism. In the early 1970s, the mainstream feminist movement was not accepting of lesbians. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and president of the National Organization for Women, famously referred to lesbians as “lavender menace” to the women’s movement, because she felt that stereotypes of lesbians as masculine and widespread bias against lesbians would make it more difficult for the primarily white heterosexual middle-class women in the women’s movement to create political change if they were associated too closely with lesbian activism. Thus, NOW worked to distance itself from lesbian issues, not allowing an early lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, to be a sponsor for NOW’s First Congress to Unite Women in 1969.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first over-the-counter weight-loss drug.

I seriously can't believe this. I mean, we spent years fighting so that women over 18 can now get EC, explaining over and over again that the drug is safe, easy to use properly, and won't promote unsafe sex, and this weight-loss drug gets approved, just like that. There's not even an age restriction to purchase it, even though the drug is "recommended" only for those 18 and over.

Last semester was full of stress and surprises for me, which is why I haven’t been around on the AGA so much. In addition to adjusting to being away at college and adjusting to being a transfer student at a school with a wildly different academic program, another big change for me was that I broke up with my girlfriend of two years, and shortly after that became involved with a man. Although I’d always been a bit uncomfortable with the “lesbian” label, I’d only ever dated women and never really anticipated getting seriously involved with a man. As a queer woman in an opposite-sex relationship, a lot of things came as a surprise to me, particularly how we’re perceived by people we don’t know.

I've been overwhelmed lately. I've been stuck in that spiral of "I need to do this, but I can't, but first I have to do this, and I don't know how I'm going to do this and I don't know what I'm doing at all and..."

So, basically, I haven't been getting a lot done. I haven't been talking much in my classes, because at first I was intimidated and I thought I didn't have anything to contribute, and now that I realize I don't need to be so intimidated, silence has become a habit that's awfully hard to break. There's getting to be constant self-censorship, I always worried that I'm not saying or doing things right, until I hardly say or do things at all. I suspect that this is not a particularly uncommon problem, to some degree or another.

There's a straight guy I've known for four years, since the first day of ninth grade. We were friends before I came out, friends when I shaved my head and wore a lot of his old clothes, and friends when I got into feminist activism. We weren't the kind of friends who talk about their feelings all the time, but we were there for each other during the more serious crush issues and school issues, and just general high school depression. We're very open with each other about most things, and whenever we hang out we always have a great time.

As I started to become more aware of feminist issues in tenth grade, I became somewhat uncomfortable with some of the things he said or did. I didn't want to hear misogynistic jokes or talk about porn with him. If he did something that bothered me, I'd just say, "That's not very funny," or something, and move on. I got the impression that he respected the actual women in his life, so him being occasionally off-color didn't seem to me to be something to end a great friendship over.

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about how I've noticed that people treat me differently depending on who I'm with.

A few days ago, I went to the bank to close my account. My father came with me, because we were on our way to do some other errands together. He waited in the line with me, and when a teller opened up he stood a little to the side as I approached the window and told the woman what I wanted. She took my ID and bank book, asked me why I was closing the account, and started typing in numbers.

After a minute or two, she turns to MY FATHER, who at this point is sort of bored and spaced out, and says, "Would she like cash or a check?"

My 13-year-old brother and my grandfather have a great relationship. They build things together, they fix things together, and he's taught my brother how to solder and woodburn. Every summer, my brother visits for a week, and they happily immerse themselves in DIY projects together.

I visited too, with my family, several times a year. But I can only remember a handful of conversations together, and no projects.

Over the years, I've started to feel that I have less and less of a relationship with him. Though I enjoyed his company, I felt he knew me less and less. I felt even worse because, while for the first decade of my life, I was his only granddaughter, he married my step-grandmother when I was ten, thus gaining about a dozen step-grandchildren, many of whom live in the area and visit often. Compared to these other teens, who were gender-normative and did things like competitive swimming and school plays, I worried that I came up short in his eyes.

Last week, I went to see an outdoor performance with my parents and 13-year-old brother. We had difficulty locating a place for all of us to sit together, and a random stranger offered a solution, telling my parents, "The angel can sit there." By "the angel," he meant me. Laying aside, for a moment, the issue that I think it is weird to call any child an angel, and is downright inappropriate after anyone reaches the age of eight, an age that I have not been for a good decade, the fact that I am appearing in public with my parents does not impede my ability to partake in dialogue about where I can sit. I just didn't get it. Were I alone, or with a female friend, the stranger would likely have addressed me, or not said anything at all. What was it, then, about my parents' presence that made him see me and treat me as though I was not an autonomous human being? Why, by sheer virtue of them being my parents, and them being there at the time, did they somehow earn the right to be addressed in conversation directly related to me? And why, by sheer virtue of spending time with my parents, did I lose it?

Today I walked around the Teen section of Barnes and Noble with my girlfriend and best friend. We lamented the vapidity of some of the books, revisited and happily summarized our old favorites for one another, and checked to see if there were any new books about queer youth. There were. Unfortunately, they involved the typical: various levels of coming out angst at a suburban high school we couldn't relate to, with the optional happy ending of the main character finding love.

Many of the "realistic fiction" books about straight characters were similarly one-sided. The romance in them was as flat and unrealistic as a fairy tale, only with more stereotyping of young women as only interested in fashion and makeup. While there were many books about sexuality--finding a boyfriend, making out--there were few that bothered to portray main characters discussing, let alone having, sex with their partners. In general, I was presented with a saccharine, cutesy, distorted fairy tale about what my life is like.

Ever since I decided I wasn't countercultural enough to refuse to go to school dances on principle and realized that I do, in fact, enjoy dances, the question of how much is too much on the dance floor has been present in my mind.

Looking around at my classmates at a school dance, I wonder: When did dancing become equivalent to dry humping? Why is that boy dancing with/dry humping his female friend while his girlfriend sits on the side looking upset about it? Why are the chaperones only breaking up a token number of couples? Why is there a girl bending over against the wall and not even really dancing at all just so a boy can hump her butt? Do the girls enjoy rubbing themselves back and forth against their partner's likely erect penis, or do they just feel obligated? Do all these people who aren't humping but are sort of pretending to be engaged in a sex act actually enjoy dancing like that, or do they just feel like that's how they should be dancing?

This summer marks a whole year since I've started doing sex education workshops, and about two years since I've started doing workshops and group facilitation. Many happy returns, I hope.

Today I did a "Women's Health" (read: sex ed) workshop at my favorite youth organization. Of all the youth organizations I've known, this one is the most in tune with, accountable to, and open to the ideas of the young people. Whatever is your passion, they'll support you. Anyway, last summer I was a participant in their program. Each morning, we'd meet with a small group of about six of our peers that would be facilitated by a woman in her early twenties who worked with the program. I had an especially awesome facilitator, and during the very first week, she prepared a series of workshops on menstruation, our attitudes toward it, and alternate menstrual products. After that, she announced that each of us would be assigned a day to prepare and do a workshop or activity with our group.

New York Court of Appeals Says No to Gay Marriage - New York's highest court ruled against gay marriage today in a 4-2 decision.
[Feminist Daily News]

Puberty, for me, was something long-anticipated, and finally dismissed. I positively loathe the term "late-bloomer"--not only because it implies that one is "late," when one is really right on time for oneself, but also because it implies that there is "blooming" going on, rather than just awkward physical and emotional growth, which seems to be a much more accurate description of what goes on during puberty. Not that I'm trying to be cynical about puberty or anything, I just hate the whole mystique about a young girl "blooming" into a woman the second she sprouts noticeable breasts. (This mystique objectifies women, and it disgusts me that even relatively feminist women like my mother say things like, "She's really a woman," when they really mean she's grown a certain type of figure.)

(After I wrote the "Teacher" post, I got to thinking I'd like to write this post as well. It's another memoir-ish thing about a certain person.)

My mother has a first cousin. For the first decade of my life, plus a few years, this cousin was a presence to be biannually seen and hugged during our visits to our mother's hometown. I knew very little about him, except that he had a lot of pets, was an artist, and occasionally cut our hair. To be honest, the only actual conversation I can remember having with him before I reached my teens was about colored pencils.

When I was around thirteen and started questioning my sexuality, it became clear to me very quickly that this cousin was gay. (He was totally out and everything, this was not a secret. Apparently, no one had bothered to let my younger self in on this information, so I was left to find it out on my own from paying more attention to the conversations my relatives were having and such.) For a few years of biannual appearances, I dreamed of discreetly coming out to him, getting to know him, gaining no-doubt valuable and great insights into the nature of being gay. We still didn't have a single conversation though. I realized he still saw me as a kid. Oh well.

I graduated today.

I've been trying to write thank-you letters to teachers who I felt have been important to my growth, and I have one last teacher to do. This one is, not surprisingly, the hardest.

I had this teacher for both semesters of my ninth grade year. In ninth grade, I was confused about my sexuality and was mostly in the closet about it because I didn't know how to tell people and worried that they would freak out and reject me. (As it turns out, people at my school aren't like that AT ALL, but I was traumatized from middle school.) Anyway, I had this teacher, and always admired her competence and dedication. I began helping her in her office, and only admired her more. In May, I began to notice that she seemed to have started bring up things related to gay issues quite often, but, paranoid semi-closet case that I was (at that point, I was out to a few close friends) I assumed that she was straight and was trying to get me to tell her that I was queer for reasons I couldn't figure out. Imagine my surprise when, one day, she randomly told me about her vacation, making it clear that she had been traveling with her children and female partner. She even went on to tell me about some of the homophobia they'd faced on the vacation.